CT: Editing Is For The Brave

Happy Friday, readers! 

To our readers in Los Angeles, I sincerely apologize because I'm sure that I've inhaled most of the coffee in the city in the last two weeks. Baristas flee when I walk in the door. Our coffee grinder at the house has given up entirely. It's dark days around these parts. 

You see, we are in the depths of editing on our webseries, Prove It!. So in the middle of all of our other jobs and projects, I'm fitting in marathon sessions with our amazing editor. And it's truly been such an incredible thing to see all of our hard work come together into an actual visual story. 

But also, it's terrible. 

Someone once told me that you write a movie (or TV show, or webseries as it turns out) three times: once on the page, once when you shoot it, and a third time during editing. I, being young and naive, probably nodded and promptly decided that didn't apply to me. Boy oh boy was I wrong. 

In the same way that writing is basically non-stop decision making, editing is non-stop decision making. This shot or that shot? Or both? And cut them here? Or here? Or here? Or maybe none of those shots make sense once you're looking at the whole sequence and now you have to start back at the beginning. And why oh why would you have yelled "Cut!" before you got the actors saying the end of the line? (Perhaps because it was the middle of the freaking night and you had so much information running around your head that you were spinning.) 

The absolute hardest thing is that in editing a film, just like editing anything else, you often have to cut stuff that you really, really like. Lines that you painstakingly wrote or images that you thought worked so well- they have to go. It doesn't matter how cool they are on their own, they don't serve the larger story and they can't stay. Its a bizarre process, because I love the story just as much as I love that shot or line. So it's awful to cut them but once you do, and you see how well the scene works without it, you're right back to elated. 

I want to be totally clear here, none of this would be the least bit bearable if we weren't working with one hell of an editor. He's amazing. He will patiently listen as I describe the (very nebulous) feeling that I want a scene to have and then do a few adjustments and bring that feeling to life. Once again, this project has brought out our amazingly talented friends who are, for some miraculous reason, willing to help us. 

So here's the update part: Prove It! is coming along really really well! We're on track to release it this summer, and soon we'll have a few sneak-peeks for you all. I'm immensely proud of this project and I know I've said this before but we can't wait to put it out for you. 

For now, I'm going to get a cappuccino and take a nap. 

CT